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diff --git a/scratch.txt b/scratch.txt index f05f1c8..64a515b 100644 --- a/scratch.txt +++ b/scratch.txt @@ -1,13 +1,48 @@ -I've got a couple of those photos where you can count the feathers on the bird's face of laughing gulls. They're everywhere down on the Gulf Coast, sit long enough and they'll come close enough that you'll get something. But that's not how I see Laughing Gulls. I see them from a distance. Not a great distance, but slyly out of reach. Like this photo. Always watching, waiting. Waiting for the humans to give up something. A chip, a Cheeto, a forgotten peanut. +I'm not going to pretend to know what Wallace Stevens was referring to by the Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is, but it has always reminded me of the fact that there are myriad complex worlds around us to which we are wholly ignorant. Not because we don't pay attention, though that may be part of it, but because we can't pay attention. There are vast existences too small to see with the naked eye. Ponds full of pond scum that have their own version of stressful jobs, political and social situations, and whatnot just as we do. They're just having it all on a very different scale, from us and happen to use chemicals instead of words to communicate. -Moo Krob Nam Ma Prow +For all you know that puddle you didn't even notice on your way into work this morning is home to a population of microbes undergoing an extremely stressful existence which they would desperately like to escape just as much as you would desperately like to escape your cubicle. + +By the same token, the nothing that is has also always reminded me that it's entirely possible, likely even I would argue, that there are some beings out there to which our existence is about the same as the pond scum. Not insignificant or unimportant, just too small to really pay any kind of meaningful attention to. After all, pretty much everyone and everything has its own set of problems to worry about. + + +Staring at nothing isn't doing nothing. It so happens that watching the world in silence isn't something our culture considers valuable and so you and I have been trained to casually dismiss it as "doing nothing". But the more I've done it, the more I realized that sitting, "doing nothing" is actually, possibly, the secret of the world so to speak. Whatever it may be, I can say from experience that it's incredibly valuable to me now and has helped me grow by leaps and bounds as a person. + +I also think it offers a practical, easy way out of many of the social messes we've created for ourselves. + +There's a lot of windbags out there criticizing the internet, especially social media, for fostering narcissism, consumer culture, intellectual bullying, and whatever other social ill gets their particular goat as it were. But it's rare that said windbags have any good ideas on how we can counteracting these forces beyond turning off the TV and internet. + +To be fair, that does work. Especially turning off the TV. Few things will improve your life so dramatically as throwing your TV out the highest window you can find (making sure there's no one below). + +The internet though is more neutral in my view. It can be good, it can be bad, it all depends on you and how you use it. In my case I have to use it, it's how I make money to live this way. And sure I can say oh I'm only going to look up whatever technical thing I need to look up to solve a particular problem, but that ideal is very different from the messy relaity that the internet is full of interesting stuff to stare at. + +\l + +Observing nature is not nothing. + +Which is to say all the things we as a culture don't want to talk about right now. -having grown up in mid-twentieth century suburbia — and then escaped! — I have a very low tolerance for the kind of boring world that comes from excess conformity and obedience to authorities. As for ways to sort through the abstractions — ah, we’ll be getting to those. +You and I find ourselves born into a declining culture. A culture that is what Spengler would call the end of an abstraction phase that will soon start swinging toward -I wish there was a way to record the texture of a place, the way the crushed gray gravel feels against the bottom of your foot, sharp, but rough, not cutting, or to reconstruct for you the dryness of the grass between your fingers, thin, smooth, like a miniature brown flute that crumbs as your roll it and it's carried off on the wind, or provide a way for you to feel the warm waft of humidity slowly receding through the evening as the sun fades and the temperature drops enough to weaken it, the way it is pushed back by the cool salt air rolling in for the night. -I can photograph the stars and record the sound of the frogs singing, but there is no way to make you feel the texture of a place. Perhaps that's for the best, lest we have another reason to not get off the couch. To feel a place you must get inside it somehow and when you do, when you've shrunk yourself down into the cracks within it, heard the thin rumor of whispers it says behind our backs, then you know that place, in your own way, and are connected to it forever more. +is a bit more complex than that. If you want to still use social media, try first developing humility. One easy way to do that is to create an active practice cultivating humility, for example, pending time in quiet observance of nature. Spend some time realizing that most of life care not at all what humans think, say or do, is helpful in + +seems like it would require an active practice. + + + + +But as we struggle through this crisis of legitimacy, what is left over when the abstractions start to wear thin? When I decide I don’t want to become an opiate addict and need to find something else? What about when it’s more serious than just a headache – what if it turns out to be cancer, and I don’t want to follow the standard ‘cut, poison, burn’ protocol? For me, it sometimes feels like there’s only a smoking crater where my brain should be. My mind often feels like it’s just a collection of Other People’s opinions and regurgitated sound bites. Even if I do try to pay attention to my own experiences, what I am able to perceive is limited by my analysis of the information coming in to my brain, which is itself conditioned by the habits of thought I learned from other people and my society. I filter out the information to which I am exposed. So there really is no objective truth out there! -https://www.ecosophia.net/the-truths-we-have-in-common/#comment-17128 + +! It’s when you realize that most of your opinions and ideas belong to other people that you can begin the central work of an age of reflection — the work of learning how to think your own thoughts, and assess other people’s opinions and ideas and your own with a set of critical tools that don’t depend on checking their fit to some collectively approved set of abstract generalizations. JMG + +ipalm fronds, whirls, fans, crisp browned tips, peeling trunks as if the whole tree were some giant alien flower, other with trunks smooth and stalk straight leading up to bunches of fronds that look like pineapples on stilts. The can be so absolutely still when the ind doesn't blow.. The slash pine mixed in, it too has a very stright trunk, shedding its lower branches as it grows so that the long, delicate needles grow in tuffs and clumps of needle fans near the top of the tree. Here and there an oak, never a big one in the palm-dominated areas, but vaguely sickly looking oaks scratching out an existence in this sandy soil. + +Twilight is soft yellow that gradually fades up to a cool white that gets cooler and cooler blow as it climbs up the sky until it reachs the rich coblant I see up through the faint waiving of pine tops in the wind, the deep rich blue of twilight, the spirit who guides the stars into the night. The sand looks gray and soft when the sun is gone, the coean grows dark and seems to settle it's restlessness a bit as the light disappears. + + +Moo Krob Nam Ma Prow +having grown up in mid-twentieth century suburbia — and then escaped! — I have a very low tolerance for the kind of boring world that comes from excess conformity and obedience to authorities. As for ways to sort through the abstractions — ah, we’ll be getting to those. - ecosophia, greer > In a home I need walls, roof, windows, and a door that can be opened and closed. I also need a place to cook, a place to eat, a place to sleep, a place for a guest, and a place to write. More space is not better... more space attracts more stuff which eventually means less space. @@ -21,8 +56,6 @@ I can photograph the stars and record the sound of the frogs singing, but there http://earlyretirementextreme.com/manifesto.html -Under the Jaguar Sun -The Burning Plain Juan Rulfo -The Labyrinth of Solitud +The Labyrinth of Solitude Juana Inés de la Cruz. Her superb book "Poems, Protest, and a Dream" Mariano Azuela's "The Underdogs" |